Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist:
In 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, oncology researcher Barry Hudson moved his laboratory from the University of Miami to Georgetown University. Many universities dialed down research activities due to the pandemic, causing a slight delay in setting up the new lab. “What that led to was, we ended up with…a lot of mice,” said Hudson. By the time the team restarted their work, the majority of the mice were more than one year old, reaching old age. Hudson recognized a unique opportunity to study cancer in these older animals, which is particularly relevant since older people experience worse outcomes in some cancers, including breast cancer.1
Despite this fact, most breast cancer researchers use two- to three-month-old mice for their work, which are equivalent in age to 15-20-year-old humans.2 “People didn’t really know what happened to cancers in older mice,” said Hudson. Now, by using aged mice, Hudson and his team discovered that aging significantly increased breast cancer metastasis via a cell surface receptor that contributes to inflammation.3 Their findings, published in Communications Biology, highlight how aging alters the host environment to boost cancer aggression and offer potential therapeutic targets to contain metastasis in older patients with cancer.
More here.
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To write about art might encourage some removal from the self, but nothing requires it. And so this accident of history has caused me to associate I-lessness with ekphrasis: a mode that elides the I as if some universal eye were speaking out. The invisible, anonymous describer of museum placards.
For most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.
Benjamin Gleede situates Gregory’s concept of simultaneous creation within the Christian tradition and discusses how Gregory goes beyond his predecessors: unlike Philo of Alexandria and Origen, Gregory develops an “evolutionary conception of the creation sequence” (103) by combining the concept of simultaneous creation with the idea of “progressive creation”. In doing so, he not only explains that the process of creation’s unfolding follows an inner order, but he also identifies the immanent intelligible powers (Logoi) that God embedded in creation at the moment of the world’s beginning and which henceforth govern this order. Gleede argues that for Gregory, the idea of “progressive creation” is necessary due to the fundamental difference between Creator and creature, between eternity and time: his “bundle-conception” of matter presupposes the successive emergence of form in matter; the world as an essentially temporal being cannot have a timeless, simultaneous origin for all its parts. Unlike his predecessors, Gregory integrates into his cosmological model the Christian conception of time as a limited teleological process that actually attains its God-given goal and whose beginning and end are set by God. This understanding of time differs fundamentally from that of the Platonists, who conceive of time as an eternal striving toward eternity that, despite all its teleological orientation, always falls short of its ideal.
Mozart sets this text to music of almost unbearable tenderness. The aria is graceful and resigned, and the whole scene is among the most beautiful in the opera. Nowhere up to this point has Fiordiligi sounded so sincere, so defeated, so richly deserving of our sympathy and compassion.
Sometime between 1914 and 1915, the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay on two poems by the Romantic poet and misunderstood visionary Friedrich Hölderlin. It is a peculiar and little-known piece of writing. By the author’s own account, it should be a straightforward exercise in close reading. But by the time he draws his conclusions he has offered all of a circuitous metaphysics of poetry, an implicit contemplation of the nature of time, and an elegy for his childhood friend Fritz Heinle, a would-be poet who had killed himself earlier that year. It’s also unmistakably the work of a young writer still finding his voice: grandiose, purple, convoluted, banal, exciting, inconclusive, all impulse and little orientation.
Researchers say they have used a 
It is not every day that an angel flies to New York. But Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” — a small, fragile drawing of a straggly angel that survived the ordeals of Nazism to become an emblem of heroic resilience — has just arrived from Jerusalem, according to James S. Snyder, the director of the Jewish Museum in New York.
Farsi is a language of tenderness. It is an infusion of poetry and humor, the intersection of everything human. “Jigareto Bokhoram”—which translates to “let me eat your liver”—is an expression of endearment. A person who is “bi Namak” is “without salt”: dull, the antithesis of charming. You could say “I love you,” or you could say, “I am willing to sacrifice myself for you” (“fadat besham”). There is an inherent desperation in how we express our love and utter our devotion. I think about what it means to live in the currents of this language. To speak with such longing, reaching. It is a reverence that feels impossible to touch.